(2) Tue Jan 26 2010 16:22Underrepresented in Wargames #2:
I'm not a big player of wargames[0] but I like the idea of dramatizing interesting historical situations and/or exploring their tactical aspects. Especially the tactical aspects of non-military conflicts like protests, standoffs, and political struggles. After posting about UATWM! I mentioned this to Sumana, and spent a couple hours searching BoardGameGeek for wargames on such topics.

By the standard of interesting wargame topics, Ted Torgerson is our favorite game designer. He created Dawn of Freedom, a Twilight Struggle mod (?) that includes a Tiananmen Square track (not really tactical, but oh well), and Free At Last, a wargame about the civil rights movement. ("If the Non-violence track reaches Non-Violence Abandoned at the end of any game turn, the segregationist player wins the game.")

In my experience a BoardGameGeek list is a fractal timesink as bad as TV Tropes, so instead of linking to "Wargames with Odd or Special Units" and "Overlooked but Important Battles" I'll just mention their names. If you go look at them, it's your own fault.

[0] But my current not-a-big-player state includes contingent factors like a lack of space to store games and a lack of friends who want to play them. In 2008 I played some Memoir '44 with Brendan and had a good time.